“PELL-MELL” TODAY.

PELL-MELL” TODAY. I have been posting on Tom Wolfe’s assertion that the American idea is the rejection of aristocracy and precedence. In a 1983 article on Robert Noyce, one of the founders of the Intel Corporation and one of the two inventors of the microchip, Wolfe argued that it was important that Noyce grew up in Grinnell, Iowa, one of the small towns in America that rejected the idea of a social hierarchy. Wolfe said that, “if [a youngster] seemed to have the quality known as genius, he was infinitely more likely to go into engineering in Iowa, or Illinois or Wisconsin, then [sic] anywhere in the East. Back east engineering was an unfashionable field. The east looked to Europe in matters of intellectual fashion, and in Europe the ancient aristocratic bias against manual labor lived on. Engineering was looked upon as nothing more than manual labor raised to the level of a science.” Moreover, in setting up his management system which became the model for Silicon Valley, “Noyce realized how much he detested the eastern corporate system of class and status with its endless gradations, topped off by the CEOs and vice-presidents who conducted their daily lives as if they were a corporate court and aristocracy. He rejected the idea of a social hierarchy at Fairchild.” Wolfe called attention to the fact that Noyce, as a manager, had put parking at his company on a first-come, first-served basis rather than by rank—an example of the “pell-mell” that he wrote about twenty-four years later.